Crowdfunding getting personal.

This week the multinational Philips announced to stop sponsoring the shirts of football club PSV after being there main sponsor for 34 years. PSV and Philips had the longest sponsor relationship in world history. Philips will only step down from their title as main sponsor and will continue to sponsor the club on other fronts and the PSV stadion will still be called the Philips Stadion. However, for a lot of fans this news came as a shock. Philips has always been the main sponsor of the club and has caused for a lot of brand awareness as well. A great amount of fans were extremely disappointed but also concerned that no one at this point will provide the club with decent shirts.

As a response a group of PSV-supporters decided to try to become head sponsor of the club, simply through crowdfunding. The group of fans tries to include as many other fans as possible. They are currently verifying if the demand for the idea is sufficient. If it is they will further work out there plans.

For the football industry this might actually be a radical innovative idea. If the crowdfunding idea works out it creates opportunities within other football clubs world-wide.

Currently, the group of fans would need about 600.000 fans to spend 10 euros each in order to collect a sufficient amount for the head sponsorship.

Crowdfunding is becoming more and more of a solution nowadays. Another great example of this is the crowdfunding campaign: Scusa Roma. A woman from the Netherlands that lives in Toscane decided to set up a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the damage that was done in Rome by football hooligans. As a response other people started campaigns for the same cause.

The following graph shows the development of crowdfunding volume on crowdfunding platforms since 2009. We see an extreme growth since then as people become increasingly interested in alternative forms of investment capital.

The examples in the football field are merely two out of a huge amount of examples for what people use crowdfunding nowadays. The most commonly known example is startups that need funding for development of their products. However, as in the Scusa Roma example, there are loads of people that also use crowdfunding platforms for a good cause. Another example is the Hakiki – Fight poverty through social enterprises – project. A group of students want to help villages in Tanzania with developing and decided to run a lot of events as for instance dinners, parties or benefit nights. However, to double the amount they have already raised they decided to start a campaign on Indiegogo.

These examples show that crowdfunding is not only for actual companies or start-ups anymore and not solely focused on investment. In contrast, they are getting closer and closer to our personal lives.